Children left behind before school starts

Richard J. Coley is director of the Educational Testing Service’s policy information center and co-author of a report.

Four major factors driving students' standardized test performance aren't even within schools' control, according to a new Educational Testing Service study. Simply by knowing the percentage of students who were often absent, raised by a single parent, not read to daily or watched five or more hours of TV daily, researchers were able to predict each state's results on a federal test with "impressive accuracy," The New York Times reports. The states that scored lowest tended to be those that had the highest percentages of children who met each of the four criteria. The New York Times